Add Individual Session

Add Session Track

Add List of Sessions

“Sessions” is pretty similar to the Speakers, Organizers, and Sponsors block, and has similar customization options. You can choose to display individual sessions, tracks of sessions, or all of your sessions.

Questions:

Would you use this block for your WordCamp?

Does this seem to give you more options, or less options, than working with the shortcode?

Would these changes make it easier or harder to display content in a way that you like, on your WordCamp site?

I like it! I was surprised to see that you could select both a full track and individual session from the same list. I didn’t see any text or other cues that would suggest that. That’s a small thing, though.

I never really had the need or design to output individual sessions or tracks not in a schedule, so I’m not really clear on the use-cases for this feature. Seeing some examples in the wild would be helpful. The most likely ones I can think of are blog posts features one or more sessions.

I could see that depending on the real-world uses, a more compact visual presentation might be preferred.

Thanks again for the great work. I think Blocks will make us save a lot of time, as options can be visually set. One of the downside of shortcodes is to know what they can do and what attributes to use to have results. So to me every block you’ve been talking about in your updates is a great improvement for WordCamp sites.

It seems like the sidebar for picking tracks is a bit inconsistent with how the Schedule block handles the same thing. With Schedule, there’s a “show all tracks” toggle, and you only choose the individual tracks if it’s disabled.

Should those two function the same way?

I can see why it’s nicer to not have the toggle, but I think that’ll introduces some ambiguity. What happens if all 3 tracks are selected, and then a 4th track is added? Should that new track be selected in all the existing blocks, because we assume that the user previously selecting all 3 tracks meant that what they really wanted was to “show all tracks”? Or should we leave the new track unselected because we interpret the user’s earlier action as “show only these 3 tracks”?

It seems like it might be more likely that they’d want to show all tracks, so if we go with that then we’ll need to make sure the code is setup that way. cc @coreymckrill

Corey McKrill
1:32 am on October 31, 2018

I think the lack of toggle here is a result of this thread. But I agree, there is ambiguity in the case that more taxonomy terms are added in the future. I would probably keep the toggle for that reason.

Correct — both Schedule and Sessions won’t use toggles here. I’m going to go back through everything and do a consistency check once these are settled.

What happens if all 3 tracks are selected, and then a 4th track is added? Should that new track be selected in all the existing blocks, because we assume that the user previously selecting all 3 tracks meant that what they really wanted was to “show all tracks”?

I agree with the “wall of text” issue as well as the speaker photos within sessions being weird issue. My opinion: it’s enough of a departure from broad practice that we shouldn’t enable them by default.

Corey McKrill
7:19 pm on October 31, 2018

I also agree that the speaker photos look weird within the session descriptions. What if we changed the layout to put speakers, with and without avatars, beneath the descriptions?

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